My Profile

My name is Steven Foster, a Microsoft CRM MVP, working at Intergen as the CRM Product and Marketing Manager. I have over 17 years of CRM experience delivering a multitude of CRM solutions across a number of countries. I hope you find my blog interesting!
I am also an entrepreneur reselling the HappyOrNot customer satisfaction service.

So what is the immersive Excel experience you say? Well imagine you are working with a list of records and you want to do a quick sum or ad hoc calculation on the values, you can now open in Excel Online inside of Dynamics CRM and perform the action that you want to do. You can even update the values and reimport in if you have the right security roles.

So what do you need?

Dynamics CRM Online Spring Release Update 1

An Office 365 plan that includes Office products

What does it look like?

So basically select any view in CRM and then select export to Excel and select Excel Online.

The view will then open in Excel online as below:

Now you have it in Excel you can manipulate the data. In the example below I have summed up the estimated value and have added a Pie Chart for effect!

Finally If update the Probability of my opportunities, I can simply select Save Changes to CRM button above the Excel logo and import the changes into CRM, easy.

Update Behaviour, the basics

One thing to note if someone else has subsequently updated one of the opportunities that I have updated in Excel, that specific row will fail on the import, the online update will always win.

What’s next?

At Convergence 2015 in the roadmap session, in the Fall release we may see some pre-built templates that can be opened in the context of the view selected and have the ability to create and then easily share. Slide from the CRM Roadmap session: